Pavel Zgaga (2018) writes about how a growing instrumentalization of higher education has implications for the notion of mobility in risk of being pursued primarily for economic reasons, overlooking the meaning and purpose with mobility, i.e. why we should enhance mobility, not just how. The same tendency might also apply to another neoliberal imperative these years within doctoral education besides mobility (Balaban & Wright, 2018), that is impact. In Denmark researchers and doctoral education are met with an increased political expectation of impact, most often conceptualized in terms of returns on investments difficult for the humanities to account directly for. Drawing on interviews with humanities doctoral supervisors, this paper illustrates and articulates how dominant public discourses of impact are both transformed, resisted, and reproduced, locally, displaying the possibilities and barriers for challenging public discourses of impact as de-contextualized, timeless, and immediately transferable, outcomes, and with implications for doctoral supervision practices.